Ed Sheeran’s legal team has another go at getting Thinking Out Loud song-theft lawsuit dismissed

completemusicupdate.com:

Ed Sheeran’s legal team last week had one last go at trying to stop one of the song-theft lawsuits relating to his song ‘Thinking Out Loud’ from proceeding to trial, urging the judge overseeing the case to reconsider a recent decision he made about the copyright dispute.It’s alleged that Sheeran ripped off the Marvin Gaye song ‘Let’s Get It On’ when he wrote ‘Thinking Out Loud’.

Based on those allegations, the estate of ‘Let’s Get It On’ co-writer Ed Townsend sued Sheeran for copyright infringement. And once that litigation was underway, a company called Structured Asset Sales, which also has a stake in the ‘Let’s Get It On’ copyright, filed its own lawsuit.It was on the latter legal battle that judge Louis Stanton recently made ruling.The Sheeran team had urged the judge to dismiss the SAS lawsuit via summary judgement, arguing that the elements shared by ‘Thinking Out Loud’ and ‘Let’s Get It On’ are common musical segments that are not protected by copyright in isolation.

That was an argument also used in another song theft legal battle involving Sheeran, the one in the UK over his song ‘Shape Of You’.In a ruling last month, Stanton noted that both sides in the dispute agree that the shared elements are “commonplace and unprotectable”.

However, the real dispute is over how those elements are combined in the two songs. So the key question is as follows: is the way Gaye and Townsend combined those elements in ‘Let’s Get It On’ protected by copyright?That question, Stanton concluded, can only be answered by a jury.